When Ariel Leve was six years old, she and her mother would play a game called Being Born. It required her to curl up into a ball and place herself in bed between her mother’s naked thighs while she puffed and groaned as if in the throes of labour. Eventually her mother would shout “Pop!”, fling back the sheets and, lo, a child was born. One afternoon Ariel had a friend around and the three of them played Being Born together, with Ariel’s mother giving birth to them alternately. “After that day,” Leve recalls, “Danielle was never allowed to come over again.”

Leve didn’t realise this wasn’t the kind of game that most mothers played with their children, and would simply delight in being the centre of attention. These moments were rare. Her parents were divorced and her father, whom she saw in the summer holidays, lived on the other side of the world, in Bangkok.

Meanwhile, her mother spent most evenings out dining with friends, or hosting parties in their apartment, or picking physical fights with her boyfriends, or yelling at her daughter for her ingratitude. “When I am dead, you will be all alone because your father doesn’t want you,” she would tell her. “Just remember that and treat me nicely.”

Ariel Leve: 'I was the parent and my mother was the child'

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An Abbreviated Life is a powerful and frequently devastating account of a childhood without boundaries and dominated by loneliness, chaos and fear. Along with recounting her early years spent on New York’s Upper East Side at the mercy of her mother’s moodswings, Leve tells of her efforts to repair the damage in her 40s through therapy, neuroscience and a relationship with a preternaturally serene Italian named Mario.

Leve is a journalist and she brings a reporter’s curiosity and diligence to her subject. Not always trusting her own version of events, she seeks the testimony of others, among them her father’s ex-girlfriend, Rita, who frequently visited Leve in New York and wrote concerned letters to her father about his ex-wife’s antics. With Rita’s corroboration comes relief. For the adult Leve, the most enduring pain comes not from the cruelty itself but from her mother’s consistent denial of what took place. “The erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse,” she writes.

Rather than trudging chronologically through her life, Leve jumps backwards and forwards in time, sharing brief snapshots, snippets of conversation, jumbled thoughts and meditations. This is, of course, how memory works, moments in time haphazardly stitched together, their significance only understood later. There are parallels here with Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson’s chronicle of a childhood lived under the rule of a tyrannical mother and an adulthood dominated by a need to make peace with it. Like Winterson’s, Leve’s recollections can be brutal but are made digestible by the elegant sparseness of her prose. There are times, however, when the injustice of it all overwhelms her and her sentences begin to bubble and spit. You get a sense of a writer forever trying keep a lid on her fury.

Perhaps in a bid to allow her some dignity, Leve never names her mother though it is not hard to discover her identity online. We are told she is a published poet and noted feminist campaigner, who made a cult documentary on the women’s movement. There are giveaways, too, in her lofty social circle. Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Andy Warhol were among the visitors to their apartment, and for whom Leve would be frequently dragged out of bed in the small hours to say hello. “It’s midnight. Can everyone go home now?” she would ask, pitifully.

Attending a work dinner in 2002, Leve met an old associate of her mother’s who had been a guest at several of her parties. After Leve left, the man told her editor: “I always wondered how that little girl would survive. I thought her only choices were suicide or murder.”

The catalyst for change in Leve, what makes her truly want to escape the horrors of her past, is becoming de facto stepmother to twin girls. Observing their blitheness and innocence, she notes how she “can’t imagine wanting these little girls to identify with sorrow. I can’t imagine hitting them. Or slapping them across the face. Or kicking them or jerking them or squeezing their arm so tight it leaves a bruise. I can’t imagine promising them something I don’t deliver. I can’t imagine accusing them of trying to hurt me or hating me or being jealous.”

This book, then, is her attempt to ensure that none of these things come to pass, to re-examine her childhood through the wisdom of adulthood and overcome her lifelong insecurity and dread. Retribution isn’t the point of An Abbreviated Life, though it is possible the author’s mother might see it that way. It is about understanding and recovery, and about looking back in order to take the first step forward.